black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.

Billy Collins

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
BILLY COLLINS

Differences Everybody Poetry Self
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Simplifying Thing Voice
As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.
BILLY COLLINS

Aware Stranger Thinking Trying Two Writing
But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
BILLY COLLINS

Echoing Everyone Home Rain Song Tell
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
BILLY COLLINS

Character Happy Kid Kids
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Moving Progress Simple
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
BILLY COLLINS

Mind Paper Relieve Trained
I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Attention Conscious Poem Progress
I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
BILLY COLLINS

Himself Interrupt Other Reader Utterance
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.
BILLY COLLINS

Gaps Ignored Poet Themselves World
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.
BILLY COLLINS

Difference Ease Graduation Kind Writing
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
BILLY COLLINS

Form Pleasure Read Thinking
It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Reader Talking Travel Writing

I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Billy Collins Quotes